In June 1967, Walter Beach III received a call from his former Browns teammate and close friend Jim Brown.

Brown, maybe the greatest running back in N.F.L. history, had stunned pro football a year earlier by retiring at 29 after an All-Pro season. Now he wanted Beach, who was working for Mayor Carl B. Stokes of Cleveland, to be part of a group of black athletes who would meet privately with Muhammad Ali to consider publicly backing Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the United States Army, as a conscientious objector.

The men (no black women were part of the group) emerged from that meeting unified in their support of Ali.

Photos from their news conference became iconic images; the moment itself would be remembered as the first — and last — time that so many African-American athletes at that level came together to support a controversial cause.

On Saturday, Brown was in Louisville, Ky., to receive the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award. Beach, home in Pennsylvania to be with his wife, who recently had surgery, did not attend the ceremony.

But Beach said the 1967 meeting, and what it signified, was ingrained in his consciousness.

“It was an unforgettable moment,” he said by phone Saturday. “It was one of the most significant moments in my life. Ali was one of the most principled and moral human beings on the planet at the time, with the sensitivity and courage to stand.”

Beach added, “We met as black men around a moral and ethical issue, not as celebrity football or basketball players.”

Beach, 81, chronicled the Ali meeting and other events in a new self-published book, “Consider This,” that contains the insights of his journey through life. A significant part of that journey was a stretch from 1960 to ’66 when Beach, a native of Pontiac, Mich., played professional football.

Brown and Beach became friends in 1963 when Beach joined the Browns as a free agent.

He had been released by the Boston Patriots of the American Football League the previous year, after he organized a protest by the black players on the team against segregated accommodations in New Orleans, where Boston was scheduled to play a preseason game. While the white Patriots were set to stay in a luxury hotel, the black players were to stay with black families.

“I told them we signed up to play football, not to be segregated against,” Beach said. He told Mike Holovak, the Patriots’ coach at the time, that he would fly down the day of the game and then fly back to Boston after the game was over.

Identified as a troublemaker, Beach was cut the next day.

But Beach’s relationship with Brown illustrates what can happen when a superstar lends muscle to a cause.

Just before the start of the 1964 season, Beach was called into a meeting with Browns coaches and the team’s owner, Art Modell, who told Beach he was being released. Brown came by the dormitory later to get Beach for practice, only to be told that Beach had been cut. Brown asked Beach to wait and returned 30 minutes later, saying, “Let’s go to practice.”

Beach was miraculously back on the team. The Browns’ management never gave him an explanation, or an apology, for the “mix-up.”

Beach was named the Browns’ starting left cornerback and helped the team win the N.F.L. title that season — Cleveland’s most recent championship in any major professional sport.

Years later, Brown said he told Modell that Beach was one of the best cornerbacks on the team and that Beach gave the Browns their best chance to win a title. If the organization would not do all it could to win a championship, Brown said, he might not be able to do all he could, either.

When Brown retired before the 1966 season, Beach said, he knew his days were numbered. And Beach was right. Modell fired him.

Three years ago, Beach brought Brown to my barbershop in Harlem for a conversation. Brown was touched when several young customers brought up the ’67 meeting.

Asked if he thought a similar meeting could happen in 2014, Brown said yes.

“It’s a slow process,” he said, “but you have to educate, not alienate. I think within the next three or four years, there’ll be a major coming together of some black athletes and entertainers to really have a platform that can bring about a whole different awareness.”

During our conversation on Saturday, Beach said he was not so certain.

“There is not a high degree of consciousness by the black athletes — social or racial consciousness,” he said. “There’s a vacuum of leadership.”

Beach pointed to the dancing, prancing and preening that have become part of the N.F.L.’s culture as symbolizing a lack of direction, if not leadership.

“I didn’t do any dancing,” he said, adding, “I was a football player, and I played football.”

Beach referred to the N.F.L. as a circus. I suggested that the league had always been a circus, even when Beach played. He protested that he played with dignity.